A Class Action Suit Brought By...Fetuses?

6.4.25

Click here to skip ahead: Care Crisis has more on the Trump administration’s move against emergency abortions. In the States, news from Louisiana, New York, Texas, Georgia, and more. Attacks on Abortion Pills reports that the FDA is officially conducting a ‘review’ of mifepristone. Criminalizing Care with more on West Virginia preparing to prosecute miscarriage patients and the arrest of a Texas midwife. In the Nation, an interview with a third-trimester abortion provider.

---

Care Crisis

Let’s kick things off with last night’s breaking news: the Trump administration has rescinded federal guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortions.

Pro-choice legal organizations were quick to point out that the White House can’t just erase EMTALA protections because they feel like it. “This action doesn’t change hospitals’ legal obligations,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center.

That said, the move does signal to Republican-led states that they can let women die without fear of consequence. Just like the White House told anti-abortion extremists they don’t need to worry about prosecution under the FACE Act—a law meant to protect abortion clinics—they’re now telling states with bans that they don’t have to worry about violating federal emergency care laws either.

And it gets worse: this is also a nod to fetal personhood. In the policy statement released last night by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Trump administration suggests that hospitals have a legal obligation to treat both the pregnant patient and their pregnancy as two separate, equal patients:

“CMS will continue to enforce EMTALA, which protects all individuals who present to a hospital emergency department seeking examination or treatment, including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy.” (Emphasis mine)

Remember—this is exactly what the conservative Fifth Circuit argued in their Texas decision last year: that “EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations.”

Imagine needing emergency surgery, and the hospital won’t touch you—because the government says your embryo deserves the same legal protections as you do.

Today, the Trump administration tried to address the backlash, claiming women will still be able to get care. But even a quick glance at the language they’re using says otherwise. In a tweet today, CMS administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz promises that “women will receive care for miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and medical emergencies.”

But why list out specific conditions? Why not just say patients will get the care they need? They’re using qualifiers because they don’t want doctors to help however they can. Honing in on ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages is a strategic anti-abortion move—and language we’ve seen in nearly every state ban. But it hasn’t stopped women from dying. Because it was never meant to.

Notice what else is missing from that tweet: the word “abortion.” Dr. Oz says women will get care, but not that they’ll be allowed life-saving abortions. Once again, that’s an anti-abortion strategy—they like to say women can receive treatment or that doctors can intervene, but never that they can have abortions. (This is why I’m such an obsessive about language!)

More on this soon, but in the meantime read last night’s newsletter for background on how we got here:

Breaking: White House Rescinds Federal Guidance on Emergency Abortions

In the States

Louisiana really is giving Texas a run for its money in the battle for most batshit anti-abortion state. For the third year in a row, legislators have rejected a bill that would allow child rape victims to obtain abortions.

Bill author Rep. Delisha Boyd, a Democrat, said, “If we’re truly pro-life, we should also be fighting for the life of those children who are raped and molested.”

The Associated Press reminds us that in the first 18 months after Dobbs, a study found there were more than 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape in states with bans. I try not to think about how many of those victims were kids—but I guess in Louisiana, Republicans don’t care.

Meanwhile, I can’t believe I missed this case out of New York: anti-abortion activists challenged the state’s Reproductive Health Act by bringing a class action suit on behalf of unborn fetuses. That’s right: the plaintiffs were supposedly fetuses (and embryos and fertilized eggs) seeking protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The suit claimed that New York’s pro-choice law creates an “imminent danger” to fetuses, making them vulnerable to “lethal attacks.” Courthouse News Service reports that during oral arguments, the anti-abortion lawyer said that “even hippopotamuses” are protected by the Constitution.

(╯°□°）╯︵🧠

Apologies—just my last brain cell making a run for it.

Thankfully, a federal appeals court upheld New York’s pro-choice protections yesterday, ruling that the anti-abortion challenger “failed to identify or otherwise describe any class member in the viable fetus class that she sought to represent.”

In less brain-melting news, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is challenging a judge’s decision to uphold an abortion restriction, despite the state constitution’s protections.

Last month, a judge struck down a handful of abortion restrictions—including a 24-hour waiting period and a law requiring patients to look at a fetal development chart and information about alternatives to abortion. But she left one rule standing: a mandatory screening for ‘coerced’ abortion.

Obviously, reproductive coercion is real—but anti-abortion activists have been weaponizing the term, pretending to care about abused women while labeling everything ‘coercion.’ (I started warning about this back in 2023, when anti-abortion strategists flagged “coercion” as the GOP’s most promising talking point.)

And as Nessel points out in her filing, it’s discriminatory to require a coercion screening for only one type of pregnancy outcome. People who continue a pregnancy or receive miscarriage care aren’t screened for coercion—so why should abortion patients be?

I’m curious to see how this one plays out, so I’ll make sure to keep you updated.

Abortion, Every Day has been tracking Texas abortion legislation closely—including all the Republican Trojan Horse bills aiming to expand the power of Attorney General Ken Paxton. This week, Texas Public Radio sat down with Ariana Rodriguez of Jane’s Due Process to talk through some of that legislation. It’s worth a listen below:

WSB-TV in Georgia looked at the OBGYN exodus this week, speaking with doctors who left after the state’s abortion ban took effect. Georgia native Dr. Ash Panakam said she left because the legal restrictions “are affecting our ability to get necessary training.”

U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, whose office recently studied the impact of the ban, said they’re also hearing from doctors who no longer want to practice in the state.

When confronted with the consequences of the ban, bill sponsor Sen. Ed Setzler said that pro-choice groups were just “mad as a hornet” that the legislation ended “their killing spree.”

If Sen. Setzler is so worried about “killing sprees,” maybe he should take a look at the state’s maternal mortality rate. Oh wait—he can’t. Republican leaders fired every single member of Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee.

Quick hits:

• St. Louis Public Radio spoke to the chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood Great Rivers about how the group is responding to “legal whiplash” in Missouri;

• The Washington Post covers the new Maine law allowing providers to keep their names off of prescription labels for abortion medication;

• And keep an eye on Wisconsin, where we’re expecting an abortion ruling soon from the state Supreme Court.

Attacks on Abortion Pills

When it rains it pours: Not only did the Trump administration give red states the green light to let women die this week, now the FDA has officially said they’re “reviewing” abortion medication.

In a June 2nd letter to Sen. Josh Hawley, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary committed to “conducting a review of mifepristone”—one of the two drugs used in medication abortion. As you likely know, Hawley has been demanding restrictions on mifepristone—pointing to a junk science study published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank.

This is all part of a well-planned strategy—one given away by the very obvious timeline. Just days before the EPPC report dropped, Makary said he might restrict mifepristone if new data showed it was unsafe. Then—just like magic!—a study appeared. Within 24 hours, Hawley sent a letter urging a full FDA review of the medication. And now here we are.

Like I said: obvious.

And let’s not lose sight of how absurd this study really is. Beyond the glaring methodological flaws and fabricated ‘complications’, it wasn’t peer-reviewed—and it was published by an anti-abortion organization!

In fact, Abortion, Every Day uncovered videos of EPPC president Ryan Anderson openly admitting that the goal of the study is to “eliminate” abortion medication entirely. On top of that, the EPPC is running an anti-mifepristone lobbying campaign alongside the country’s top anti-abortion groups. Not exactly the actions of objective researchers!

That’s why I was so pissed off today to see this article from UPI, citing the study like it’s credible and hasn’t been thoroughly debunked. No mention of the anti-abortion bias. No note that it wasn’t peer-reviewed. Nothing. Thankfully, other outlets have done better—but this is exactly the kind of incomplete coverage that anti-abortion politicians are hoping for.

I’ll have lots more on abortion pills for you in tomorrow’s newsletter: including the new ‘studies’ that anti-abortion groups are pushing in the hopes we’ll forget about the bad science of this one! In the meantime, read this terrific piece at The Nation about “The Misinformation Campaign Trying to Bring Down Abortion Pills.”

Criminalizing Care

I told you yesterday about the West Virginia prosecutor who gave a public interview admitting that the state plans to prosecute miscarriage patients. He told WVNS—without a hint of shame—that if women want to avoid arrest after losing a pregnancy, they should just “call 911.”

I made a quick video about it, if anyone wants to watch or share.

jessicavalenti

A post shared by @jessicavalenti

Meanwhile, make sure to read this terrific but distressing article from Alanna Vagianos at HuffPost about the Texas midwife arrested for allegedly providing abortions: Apparently even though Maria Rojas was arrested, she still hasn’t been formally charged with a crime.

Vagianos writes that Rojas is “in an excruciating limbo where she’s unable to make money, but forced to pay for a costly legal defense with little public evidence against her.”

It appears that Texas has very little evidence against Rojas, and that Attorney General Ken Paxton was just eager to arrest someone for violating the abortion ban. From Marc Hearron with the Center for Reproductive Rights, lead lawyer on Rojas’ civil case:

“If the state can do this shoddy investigation, get an arrest warrant and throw you in jail, just by saying the word ‘abortion,’ without even actually having the evidence to back it up—any health care provider is at risk in the state of Texas.”

Seriously, read this whole piece—and then share it.

In the Nation

Andrea González-Ramírez at The Cut has a must-read interview with abortion provider Dr. Shelley Sella, author of Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care. It was hard to pick a quote to share with you all, because everything Dr. Sella says feels vitally important. But this—about why she wrote her book—stuck out:

“I want to show that all the patients that I cared for deserved to have an abortion later in pregnancy. There’s no hierarchy of desperation. People who have difficult life situations are as deserving of care as those who are ending the pregnancy for other reasons.”

Dr. Sella is actually joining Abortion, Every Day for a livestream next Thursday evening—so make sure to mark your calendars, and pick up her book.